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Desire is a sense of longing for a person or
object or hoping for an outcome. The same sense is expressed by
emotions such as "craving" or "hankering". When a person desires
something or someone, their sense of longing is excited by the
enjoyment or the thought of the item or person, and they want to
take actions to obtain their goal. The motivational aspect of
desire has long been noted by philosophers; Hobbes (1588 – 1679)
asserted that human desire is the fundamental motivation of all
human action.

In Buddhism, for an
individual to effect his or her liberation, the flow of
sense-desire must be cut completely; however, while training, he or
she must work with motivational processes based on skilfully
applied desire.[1] The Buddha
stated, according to the early Buddhist scriptures, that monks
should "generate desire" for the sake of fostering skillful
qualities and abandoning unskillful ones.[2]

While desires are often classified as emotions by laypersons,
psychologists often describe desires as different from emotions;
psychologists tend to argue that desires arise from bodily
structures, such as the stomach's need for food, whereas emotions
arise from a person's mental state. Marketing and advertising companies have used
psychological research on how desire is stimulated to find more
effective ways to induce consumers to buy a given product or
service. While some advertising attempts to give buyers a sense of
lack or wanting, other types of advertising create desire
associating the product with desirable attributes, either by
showing a celebrity or model with the product.

The theme of desire is at the core of the romance novel,
which often create drama by showing cases where human desire is
impeded by social conventions, class, or cultural barriers. As
well, it is used in other literary genres, such as gothic novels
such as Dracula by
Bram Stoker, in
which desire is mingled with fear and dread. Poets ranging from W.B.
Yeats to T. S.
Eliot have dealt with the themes of desire in their work. Just
as desire is central to the written fiction genre of romance, it is
the central theme of melodrama films, which use plots that appeal
to the heightened emotions of the audience by showing "crises of
human emotion, failed romance or friendship", in which desire is
thwarted or unrequited.

In
philosophy

In philosophy, desire has been identified as a philosophical
problem since Antiquity. In Plato's The Republic, he argues
that individual desires must be postponed in the name of the higher
ideal. In Aristotle's De
Anima, he claims that desire is implicated in animal
interactions and the propensity of animals to motion; at the same
time, he acknowledges that reasoning also interacts with desire. Hobbes (1588
– 1679) proposed the concept of psychological hedonism, which
asserts that the "fundamental motivation of all human action is the
desire for pleasure." Spinoza (1632 – 1677) had a view which
contrasted with Hobbes, in that "he saw natural desires as a form
of bondage" that are not chosen by a person of their own free will.
Hume (1711 – 1776)[1] claimed that
desires and passions are noncognitive, automatic bodily responses,
and he argued that reasoning is "capable only of devising means to
ends set by [bodily] desire".[3]

Kant (1724
– 1804) "called any action based on desires a hypothetical imperative,
meaning by this that it is a command of reason that applies only if
one desires the goal in question. [4]Kant also
established a relation between the beautiful and pleasure in Critique of Judgment. Hegel claimed that
"self-consciousness is desire."

Because desire can cause humans to become obsessed and
embittered, it has been called one of the causes of woe for
mankind.[5] Within
the teachings of Buddhism,
craving is
thought to be the cause of all suffering that one experiences in human
existence. The eradication of craving leads one to ultimate
happiness, or Nirvana.
Desire for wholesome things, though, is liberating and
enhancing.[6] While
the stream of desire for sense-pleasures must be cut eventually, a
practitioner on the path to liberation is encouraged by the Buddha
to "generate desire" for the fostering of skillful qualities and
the abandoning of unskillful ones.[2]

Scientific perspectives

Psychology and neurology

While desires are often classified as emotions by laypersons,
psychologists often describe desires as different from emotions.
For psychologists, desires arise from bodily structures, such as
the stomach which needs food, the blood needs oxygen, and so on; on
the other hand, emotions arise from a person's mental state. A 2008
study by the University of Michigan indicated that while humans
experience desire and fear as psychological opposites, they share
the same brain circuit. [7] A 2008
study entitled "The Neural Correlates of Desire" showed that the
human brain categorizes any stimulus according to its desirability
by activating three different brain areas: the superior
orbito-frontal, the mid-cingulate, and the anterior cingulate
cortices. [8]

While the "neuroscience of happiness and well-being is still in
its infancy", research on the "distant cousins" of pleasure and
desire show that reward is a key element in creating both of these
states. Studies showed that a chemical called dopamine is the brain's "pleasure chemical".
Research also shows that the orbitofrontal cortex has connections
to both the opioid and dopamine systems, and stimulating this
cortex is associated with subjective reports of pleasure.[9]

Psychiatry

Austrian psychiatrist Sigmund Freud (1856 – 1939), who is best
known for his theories of the unconscious mind and the defense
mechanism of repression and for creating the clinical practice of
psychoanalysis, proposed the notion of the Oedipus Complex, which argues that desire
for the mother creates neuroses in their sons. Freud used the Greek
myth of Oedipus to argue that people desire incest and must repress
that desire. He claimed that children pass through several stages,
including a stage in which they fixated on the mother as a sexual
object.

French psychoanalyst and psychiatrist Jacques Lacan (1901 – 1981) argues that
desire first occurs during a "mirror phase" of a baby's
development, when the baby sees an image of wholeness in a mirror
which gives them a desire for that being. As a person matures,
Lacan claims that they still feel separated from themselves by
language, which is incomplete, and so a person continually strives
to become whole. He uses the term "jouissance" to refer to the lost object or
feeling of absence which a person believes to be unobtainable. For
more details on the Lacanian conception of desire, see desire (psychoanalysis)

In
marketing

In the field of marketing, desire is the human appetite for a
given object of attention. Desire for a product is stimulated by
advertising, which attempts to give buyers a sense of lack or
wanting. In store retailing, merchants attempt to increase the
desire of the buyer by showcasing the product attractively, in the
case of clothes or jewelery, or, for food stores, by offering
samples. With print, TV, and radio advertising, desire is created
by giving the potential buyer a sense of lacking ("Are you still
driving that old car?") or by associating the product with
desirable attributes, either by showing a celebrity using or
wearing the product, or by giving the product a "halo effect" by
showing attractive models with the product. Nike's "Just Do It" ads
for sports shoes are appealing to consumers' desires for
self-betterment.

In some cases, the potential buyer already has the desire for
the product before they enter the store, as in the case of a
decorating buff entering their favorite furniture store. The role
of the salespeople in these cases is simply to guide the customer
towards making a choice; they do not have to try and "sell" the
general idea of making a purchase, because the customer already
wants the products. In other cases, the potential buyer does not
have a desire for the product or service, and so the company has to
create the sense of desire. An example of this situation is for
life insurance. Most young adults are not thinking about dying, so
they are not naturally thinking about how they need to have
accidental death insurance. Life insurance companies, though, have
managed to create a desire for life insurance with advertising that
shows pictures of children and asks "If anything happens to you,
who will pay for the children's upkeep?".

Another example is personal hygiene products, such as
anti-dandruff shampoo and mouthwash. Prior to the introduction of
commercials advertising anti-dandruff shampoo or mouthwash, it is
unlikely that consumers had an intrinsic desire to use these
products. However, after seeing commercials depicting the social
undesirability of flakes on the shoulder, or of bad breath, it
created a desire to resolve these fears. Marketing theorists call
desire the third stage in the hierarchy of effects, which occurs
when the buyer develops a sense that if they felt the need for the
type of product in question, the advertised product is what would
quench their desire. [10]

In
fiction, film, and art

Fiction

The theme of desire is at the core of the romance novel. Novels
which are based around the theme of desire, which can range from a
long aching feeling to an unstoppable torrent, include Madame Bovary
by Gustave
Flaubert; Love in the Time of
Cholera by Gabriel Garcia
Marquez; the sensual, yet controversial novel Lolita by Vladimir
Nabokov; Jane
Eyre by Charlotte Bronte, and Dracula by Bram Stoker. Brontë's characterization of
Jane Eyre depicts her as torn by an inner conflict between reason
and desire, because "customs" and "conventionalities" stand in the
way of her romantic desires.[11]E.M.
Forster's novels use homoerotic codes to describe same-sex
desire and longing. Close male friendships with subtle homoerotic
undercurrents occur in every novel, which subverts the
conventional, heterosexual plot of the novels. [12] In
the gothic-themed Dracula, Stoker depicts the theme of
desire which is coupled with fear. When the Lucy character is
seduced by Dracula, she describes her sensations in the graveyard
as a mixture of fear and blissful emotion.

Poet W.B. Yeats depicts the positive and
negative aspects of desire in his poems such as “The Rose for the
World,” “Adam’s Curse,” “No Second Troy,” “All Things can Tempt
me,” and “Meditations in Time of Civil War” . Some poems depict
desire as a poison for the soul; Yeats worked through his desire
for his beloved, Maud Gonne, and realized that “Our longing, our
craving, our thirsting for something other than Reality is what
dissatisfies us”. In “The Rose for the World,” he admires her
beauty, but feels pain because he cannot be with her. In the poem
“No Second Troy,” Yeats overflows with anger and bitterness because
of their unrequited love. [13] Poet
T. S. Eliot dealt
with the themes of desire and homoeroticism in his poetry, prose
and drama. [14] Other
poems on the theme of desire include John Donne's poem "To His Mistress Going to
Bed", Carol Ann
Duffy's longings in "Warming Her Pearls; Ted Hughes' "Lovesong" about the savage
intensity of desire; and Wendy Cope's humorous poem "Song".

Philippe Borgeaud's novels analyse how emotions such as erotic
desire and seduction are connected to fear and wrath by examining
cases where people are worried about issues of impurity, sin, and
shame.

Film

Just as desire is central to the written fiction genre of
romance, it is the central theme of melodrama films, which are a subgenre of the
drama film. Like
drama, a melodrama depends mostly on in-depth character
development, interaction, and highly emotional themes. Melodramatic
films tend to use plots that appeal to the heightened emotions of
the audience. Melodramatic plots often deal with "crises of human
emotion, failed romance or friendship, strained familial
situations, tragedy, illness, neuroses, or emotional and physical
hardship." Film critics sometimes use the term "pejoratively to
connote an unrealistic, bathos-filled, campy tale of romance or
domestic situations with stereotypical characters (often including
a central female character) that would directly appeal to feminine
audiences."[15] Also
called "women's movies", "weepies", tearjerkers, or "chick
flicks".

“Melodrama…is Hollywood’s fairly consistent way of treating
desire and subject identity”, as can be seen in well-known films
such as Gone With the
Wind , in which "desire is the driving force for both
Scarlett and the hero, Rhett". Scarlett desires love, money, the
attention of men, and the vision of being a virtuous “true lady”.
Rhett Butler desires to be with Scarlett, which builds to a burning
longing that is ultimately his undoing, because Scarlett keeps
refuses his advances; when she finally confesses her secret desire,
Rhett is worn out and his longing is spent.[16]

In Cathy Cupitt's article on "Desire and Vision in Blade
Runner", she argues that film, as a "visual narrative form, plays
with the voyeuristic desires of its audience". Focusing on the
dystopian 1980s science fiction film Blade Runner, she calls the film an
"Object of Visual Desire", in which it plays to an "expectation of
an audience's delight in visual texture, with the 'retro-fitted'
spectacle of the post-modern city to ogle" and with the use of the
"motif of the 'eye'". In the film, "desire is a key motivating
influence on the narrative of the film, both in the 'real world',
and within the text."[17]

References

^
Steven Collins, Selfless Persons: Thought and Imagery in Theravada Buddhism."
Cambridge University Press, 1982, page 251: "In the end, the
flowing streams of sense-desire must be 'cut' or 'crossed'
completely; nevertheless, for the duration of the Path, a monk must
perforce work with motivational and perceptual processes as they
ordinarily are, that is to say, based on desire ... Thus, during
mental training, the stream is not to be 'cut' immediately, but
guided, like water along viaducts. The meditative steadying of the
mind by counting in- and out-breaths (in the mindfulness of
breathing) is compared to the steadying of a boat in 'a fierce
current' by its rudder. The disturbance of the flow of a mountain
stream by irrigation channels cut into its sides it used to
illustrate the weakening of insight by the five
'hindrances'."

^ ab
Thanissaro Bhikkhu, "The Wings to Awakening," [1]. See
specifically this section.